As you progress deeper into the game, you run into difficult encounters nestled deep within manageable encounters, something that I find refreshing. Five minutes and one dead party later, I realized the error of my ways. Very early on in Avernum I ran up against a band of beasties that I thought would be cake. Or, more specifically, Avernum requires you to think about things like attack order, character placement and how your party’s traits work together more than Avadon did. I may be remembering things incorrectly, but I feel like Avernum is harder than Avadon. As character tweaking goes, it’s nothing revolutionary, but it allows for a little more character customization than the last game did, which goes nicely with the ability to create a team of whatever character classes you choose. Putting points in missile weapons or thrown weapons allows you to buff your dexterity. For example, placing multiple points in Mage Spells or Priest Spells opens up the Increased Intelligence trait or the Swordmage trait. In some cases, skills from Avadon have been renamed as traits in Avernum, but in other cases, these are totally new character modifiers that open up new ways of tweaking your build as you increase skills. Averum lets me relive that, albeit in a smaller form as you only have four party members.Īvernum uses the same attribute and skill progression system as Avadon but they added traits into the mix. One of my favorite moments of my PC gaming days was creating an Icewind Dale party to mirror the characters in Buffy the Vampire Slayer and then bringing them through IWD and IWD2. Is this a group of all ex-soldiers who spoke out and were banished, or maybe it’s a tribe of hill people, barbarians, shamans and sorcerers that were sent to Avernum for not hewing to the Empire’s wishes. Don’t get me wrong, I think there are probably more narrative opportunities when you can use the party members and their interactions to drive the story, but at the same time, I love rolling an entire party and coming up with their group dynamics in my head. You can go with the generic group, like I did, or make your own band of merry adventurers. There’s no back story other than what you put into it. BioWare and Black Isle fans from back in the day should know what I’m talking about, but for those that didn’t rock the Infinity Engine games, what I mean is that where Avadon gave you the option of picking a character and then surrounding that character with a team of pre-made characters, all with their own back stories, Avernum allows you to create your whole party from scratch. If Avadon was Baldur’s Gate, then Avernum is Icewind Dale. At ten bucks, both are incredible values with tons of replayability.įor all they share though, in my mind, Avernum is the better game and here’s why. They both share a lot of similarities in terms of battle mechanics and inventory management and such. Both are isometric, turn based RPGs from Spiderweb Software. Avernum: Escape from the Pit was released for the iPad last week, coinciding with my vacation, the same as when Avadon: The Black Fortress was released last year.
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